The World Will Never See the Like by John L. Hopkins

Author:John L. Hopkins [Hopkins, John L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877)
Publisher: Savas Beatie
Published: 2023-11-06T04:00:00+00:00

“When Longstreet joined the Republicans instead of rallying to the Lost Cause,” Piston notes, “he exposed not only his present motives but his Confederate past to attack.”12

So long as Lee was alive, criticism of Longstreet focused on those present motives. But after Lee’s death in October 1870, partisans of the Lost Cause, led by Jubal Early, began to develop a new line of attack. In a speech at the newly renamed Washington and Lee College in January, 1872, Early claimed that on the night of July 1, 1863, Lee had said that he intended Longstreet’s Corps to attack the Federals at dawn the next day. Had Longstreet done as their chief desired, Early declared, rather than delaying his assault until late afternoon, Gettysburg would have been the decisive Confederate victory that secured Southern independence.

Longstreet did not respond publicly to the first appearance of this patent fabrication, nor for years thereafter, as Early and allies such as the Reverend William N. Pendleton, Lee’s former chief of artillery, who had good reason to deflect attention from his own performance at Gettysburg, continued to insist that Longstreet had bungled Lee’s plan for a dawn attack on July 2. But as Piston observes, “Early’s words took on great power and the ring of authority because he told Southerners exactly what they wanted to hear. His version of Gettysburg, which blamed Longstreet, provided an explanation for the Confederacy’s defeat which neither entailed the loss of God’s Grace nor questioned the superiority of Southern civilization. He chose as his scapegoat a man already intensely unpopular, who was not identified with any one state and who could therefore be attacked without insulting the memory of soldiers from any part of the South.”13

By the late 1870s, however, Longstreet could stand no more. He published a pair of articles in McClure’s, later reprinted in The Annals of the War Written by Leading Participants North and South, in which he quoted extensively from letters of members of Lee’s staff to thoroughly demolish the myth of the intended dawn attack. Had he stopped there, he might have done much to repair the damage to his wartime reputation, but he went on to offer a critique of his commander’s performance at Gettysburg. “There is no doubt,” Longstreet wrote, “that General Lee, during the crisis of that campaign, lost the matchless equipoise that usually characterized him, and that whatever mistakes were made were not so much matters of deliberate judgment as the impulses of a great mind disturbed by unparalleled conditions.” Far from putting the controversy to rest, Longstreet’s articles ignited a new wave of vituperative responses from Early, Pendleton, and others, much of it in the pages of the Southern Historical Society Papers. Longstreet fired back. During a trip to Antietam in 1893, he gave a long interview to Leslie J. Perry, a Union veteran and one of the compilers of The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, which ran in The Washington Post. In it,

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